As we continue to invest in Latin America’s digital transformation, we’re helping to ensure that overlooked communities benefit from it. In 2022 we announced a five-year, $1.2 billion commitment to help the region to thrive, focusing on digital infrastructure, digital skills, entrepreneurship, and inclusive, sustainable communities. This included $10 million from Google.org for Mexico's Southeast region, home to more than 50% of the country's Indigenous population. The initiative will mostly benefit women during its first three years, supporting programmes to accelerate financial inclusion and reduce the gender gap.

To improve access to digital services in Latin America, we built the Firmina subsea cable, named after Brazilian abolitionist Maria Firmina dos Reis. It runs from the U.S. to Argentina, with additional landings in Brazil and Uruguay. Firmina follows three other significant cable investments in Latin America – Monet, Tannat, and Curie – which together bring more reliable connectivity to the region.

In partnership with African organisations, businesses, and entrepreneurs, we’re committed to building for Africa and supporting the continent’s economic growth. Together, we’re helping to unlock the benefits of the digital economy for more people by providing useful products, programmes, and investments. Here are two noteworthy initiatives:

• In 2021, we announced a $1 billion investment in Africa over five years to cover a range of initiatives, from improved connectivity to assistance for startups. The goal is to advance the continent’s digital transformation in four key areas:
  • Enabling affordable access and building products for every kind of African user
  • Helping businesses with their digital transformation
  • Investing in entrepreneurs to spur next-generation technologies
  • Supporting nonprofits working to improve lives across Africa
     
• African software developers are an engine for digital transformation in local economies across the continent. To build awareness of this evolving landscape, we published the Africa Developer Ecosystem report in 2021 and 2022. We also offer regional training, community, and mentorship programmes to support African developers at every stage of their journey.

Everywhere we look, AI is providing our economies and communities with new and exciting opportunities. From tracking real-time global carbon emissions, to predicting disease outbreaks, to helping communities unlock their potential, AI can transform how we tackle social and environmental challenges around the world.

But research shows that social entrepreneurs from underrepresented communities in Europe face significant barriers to growing their businesses and scaling their impact. To help them share in the opportunities that AI presents, in 2023 we launched the Google.org Social Innovation Fund on AI. The goal is to help European entrepreneurs from underserved backgrounds develop transformative AI solutions and apply them to the issues they’re tackling on a daily basis. As a result, these changemakers gain the resources they need to make the benefits of AI available to everyone, in Europe and beyond.

The fund covers a range of initiatives aimed at providing capital, sharing expertise, and growing the AI ecosystem. Programmes include Social Tides, an incubator and accelerator powered by INCO, and responsible AI support from our Google for Startups Accelerator team.

When women have equal access to information and opportunity, anything is possible. That’s why we care so deeply about helping more women around the world find pathways into tech. Through both new and existing programmes and partnerships, we’re working toward gender parity at all levels and across the entire global tech industry. Take a glance at some of our efforts:

• DigiPivot is an India-based training programme that aims to upskill women in digital marketing to close the field’s gender gap. The year 2022 marked the completion of our three-year pilot, with our latest cohort tripling the size of the previous year’s. Participants reported the highest satisfaction score and confidence uplift to date, as well the highest rate of pivots to digital marketing careers. Encouraged by these results, we’re continuing to scale DigiPivot’s reach across India, while also exploring markets in the Asia-Pacific region.

• The Women Techmakers program provides visibility, community, and resources for women in technology. Among other initiatives, in 2022 it organised a two-day event in Chennai, India, for girls to learn the basics of computers and technology. It also runs the Women Developer Academy, which equips participants with the skills, resources, and support they need to become leaders in the industry through public speaking and other community contributions.

• Women Will supports women’s economic potential through digital skills and community building in 49 countries around the world. From digital skills training to webinars on leadership and entrepreneurship, it offers options for women at all stages of their careers.

• The Internet Saathi initiative, a joint effort between Google and Tata Trusts, equips women in villages across rural India with basic internet skills. In 2021, the programme reached its goal of training 30 million women.

• We recently ran a Google for Startups Sales Academy tailored specifically to the needs of women founders in the Asia-Pacific region. The goal was to help them gain critical sales skills for acquiring new customers and partners, which can be challenging for underrepresented founders who often lack built-in connections to networks and funding.

Google Career Certificates are flexible, affordable online training courses that prepare graduates for successful careers in high-growth fields. Through various partnerships around the world, we’re using these programmes to create new opportunities for learners from underrepresented communities. Here’s how:

• To help more people around the world enter rapidly growing fields, we introduced new advanced certificates in business intelligence and advanced data analytics. Developed and taught by experts at Google, they’re designed to help learners grow in their data analytics careers — whether that means unlocking new opportunities, assuming more responsibilities, or gaining a competitive edge.

• In Singapore, small and medium businesses employ over 70% of the local workforce and contribute to more than 40% of the country's GDP. Yet, according to local reports, over 60% of them have yet to adopt digital technologies. To make training opportunities more accessible, we extended 15,000 Google Career Certificate scholarships until December 2024 at no cost to 300 local businesses across various sectors.

• In 2022, we established a $100 million Google Career Certificates Fund with the goal of enabling Social Finance, a finance and advisory nonprofit, to reach more than 20,000 American workers.

• As part of our commitment to military veterans, we established the Google SVA Scholarship in partnership with Student Veterans of America. The scholarship provides assistance to student veterans who are pursuing university degrees in the field of computer science in the U.S.

• We’re providing 100,000 Google Career Certificates scholarships in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa in collaboration with local organisations. Half of these scholarships will go to learners from vulnerable populations.

• In 2022, we partnered with Indonesia’s Telkom University to offer thousands of scholarships for students pursuing a Google Career Certificate in IT support. The goal is to produce much-needed digital experts who can help the Indonesian economy grow.

• Google is committed to helping strengthen cybersecurity in Africa by sharing our expertise and expanding access to cybersecurity careers. To that end, we created a new Google Career Certificate course designed for students in Sub-Saharan Africa. It will help close the growing skills gap in the cybersecurity field by giving Africa’s jobseekers the ability to solve local problems and access global opportunities.

For economies around the world to grow and flourish, digital skills have become an essential ingredient – but many communities still lack access to the training and expertise they need to harness the full potential of technology. We’re doing our part to help address the digital skills gap in a number of ways. Here are a few examples:

• A $2 million Google.org grant to Pro Mujer in 2022 to help Indigenous women-led businesses in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras access microloans and digital skills training

• Google Digital Garage, which has helped more than 800,000 people across Britain learn digital skills to enhance their careers

• The Japan Reskilling Consortium, which brings together more than 40 partners from business, local government, and the nonprofit sector to address Japan’s digital skills gap through training and business support

• Grant funding for the Japan Foundation for Aging and Health to help them reach 50,000 older people, with a mix of programmes focused on digital training, community building, and employment support

• Skills Ignition SG, a Grow with Google programme helping 3,000 Singaporeans and permanent residents get the skills they need for changing technology and a shifting job market

• Google Machine Learning Bootcamp, a three-month intensive training programme to help students and developers in South Korea and beyond solve real-world problems using machine learning

• Our Be Internet Awesome programme, which helps caregivers around the world talk to their children about cyberbullying, misinformation, and privacy

We believe that when startups succeed, communities and economies succeed. Google is uniquely positioned to provide capital and support to help founders – particularly those from underrepresented groups – grow their businesses, build innovative solutions, and create a ripple effect of economic opportunity. Here are a few of our programmes aimed at empowering Black and Latino technology entrepreneurs around the world:

• Tech Equity Collective (TEC) is an initiative started by Google employees who rallied together in the summer of 2020 to help Black professionals grow and thrive in the tech industry. It accelerates Black innovation and representation in tech by bringing together community and industry partners to create programmes and experiences that lead to tangible progress of Black tech innovators. For example, TEC oversees a $1 million commitment to organisations dedicated to forging career pathways for aspiring Black technical talent.

• In 2020, we launched our first Google for Startups Black Founders Fund to help Black tech entrepreneurs overcome the disproportionate hurdles they face when raising capital. Within months of receiving Google's funding, that first group of recipients went on to raise millions in subsequent follow-on funding, often crediting Google's funding as a powerful driver of additional investment. Based on that success, we expanded the Founders Fund to Brazil, Europe, and Africa, and in 2022 we announced our first Latino Founders Fund in the U.S.

• In Brazil, the Black Ads Academy programme offers certifications to equip Black entrepreneurs and professionals with digital marketing skills and knowledge of Google advertising solutions.

In Africa, we’re involved in multiple initiatives to drive innovation and entrepreneurship – including our new product development centre in Nairobi and a $1 billion investment in the continent’s digital transformation. We’re focused on projects that expand opportunity by increasing access to technology and digital skills, such as the University of Namibia’s efforts to boost AI expertise in Africa with support from Google’s Award for Inclusion Research (AIR) programme. We’re also conducting research and development to overcome specific challenges, like the difficulty of providing services to informal settlements in Sub-Saharan Africa. Designed to address this obstacle, Google’s AI-powered Open Buildings dataset contains the locations and geometry of buildings across most of Africa, providing actionable information for state and non-state actors.

Even as the number of women-led companies continues to grow, startups founded by women receive significantly less funding and often have limited resources at their disposal. That’s why we’ve introduced initiatives tailored to the specific needs of women founders through Google for Startups, which supports thriving, diverse, and inclusive startup communities around the world. In Israel, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific region, our Growth Academy programme connects participants to the people, programmes, and resources they need to grow and scale their businesses. In India, Africa, and North America, our accelerators help women entrepreneurs build their networks and brands.

Google has partnered with the World Health Organization (WHO) to bring billions of people around the world credible health-related information, helping them respond to emerging and future public health issues. As part of this collaboration, we issued SOS alerts during the COVID-19 pandemic, awarded more than $370 million in Ad Grants, and launched additional knowledge panels on Google Search in multiple languages, including Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish.

We’re also working with WHO to bridge the digital divide, particularly for under-resourced communities. That’s why we launched Open Health Stack (OHS), a suite of components to help developers build offline-capable, data-driven healthcare apps. Early adopters are using OHS components in Sub-Saharan Africa, India, and Southeast Asia to make evidence-based guidelines more accessible to frontline health workers through digital tools.

We believe that Google research, products, and technologies – including AI-powered solutions – can contribute to healthcare breakthroughs, bringing hope to billions of people and communities around the world. To that end, we continue to engage in thoughtful collaboration with researchers, healthcare organisations, and the broader ecosystem. Here’s a glimpse at some of our latest projects:

• Together with Northwestern Medicine, Google Health explored whether AI models can help diagnose breast cancer earlier, narrowing the assessment gap and improving the patient experience. This work is among the first prospective randomised controlled studies for AI in breast cancer screening.

• We’re partnering with the organisation Right to Care to make AI-powered tuberculosis screenings widely available across Sub-Saharan Africa.

• Engineers from Google Research teamed up with a consortium of 119 scientists from 60 institutions to release the draft human pangenome reference in a Nature paper. Assembled from the genomes of 47 people from diverse ancestries around the world, the pangenome better represents human genetic diversity and has the potential to help doctors find new ways to treat diseases and develop new therapeutics.

• Google for Startups Growth Academy: AI for Health supports startups using AI to solve pressing health and wellbeing challenges in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Alumni are doing groundbreaking work to help people everywhere live healthier lives by gaining equitable access to the care they need.

• We launched the Google Health Equity Research Initiative to support communities that have been historically underserved by healthcare. Started by Fitbit in 2021, the initiative provides researchers with resources and technologies to advance their work – including Fitbit devices and services, Google Cloud credits, and Fitabase support and funding. Efforts by the 2023 awardees will impact LGBTQ+, Black, Latino, and Alaskan Natives communities, as well as underserved birthing parents and groups experiencing intimate partner violence.

Prolonged heat waves and flooding from large storms are becoming more frequent in more places, and overlooked communities disproportionately experience the impact of these extreme weather events. We’re finding ways for our technology to help people and cities mitigate the risks. Here’s some of the work we’re doing:

• When people visit Google.com for information on extreme heat, they’ll see details on when a heat wave is predicted to start and end, tips on staying cool, and related health concerns to be aware of – all prominently displayed in Search results. To make sure the information is relevant and accurate, we’re working with the Global Heat Health Information Network (GHHIN).

• We’ve expanded access to Tree Canopy, part of our Environmental Insights Explorer, which combines AI and aerial imagery so cities can understand their current tree coverage and better plan urban forestry initiatives to create cooler environments.

• To support communities that may not have access to reliable air conditioning, we’re developing infrastructure that keeps indoor temperatures cooler. By using artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms and Google’s aerial imagery, we’re mapping out the solar reflectivity of cities so urban planners and governments can expand the adoption of heat-fighting cool roofs.

After an inclusivity audit of our own marketing revealed many areas to improve, we partnered with external inclusion experts to build a set of resources and principles to help us tell stories more equitably. We’ve shared these insights to drive progress across the industry and help everyone create work that positively and authentically reflects the world. To improve representation of people with disabilities, we recently added an accessible marketing playbook, developed in close collaboration with Disability:IN, LaVant Consulting, and others.

In the creative industries, difference is a powerful tool that inspires the world’s most innovative and memorable work. But while diverse talent is abundant, underrepresented creatives often face hurdles due to bias, prejudice, and toxic cultures. Designed to address this issue, Rare with Google helps underrepresented creatives access the tools and networks they need to thrive at every stage of their career, while helping allies create a more inclusive working environment for them to do so. The programme offers training, research, resources, meetups, and mentorship to members of overlooked communities as they enter creative fields and rise into leadership positions. Supported by recognised creatives and scaled with a global network of agency and academic partners, it offers both global insights and localised knowledge so that no individual, industry, or region is left behind.

YouTube has always been a platform that celebrates a broad and diverse set of voices, but we recognise the need to do more. So in 2020, we launched the #YouTubeBlack Voices Fund, a global multi-year commitment dedicated to spotlighting and supporting Black creators and artists so they can thrive on YouTube and share their stories with the world. Since 2020, we have welcomed grantees hailing from the U.S., Kenya, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Australia, South Africa, and Nigeria, and our YouTube Black Voices Class of 2023 is our biggest class yet with 179 grantees from around the world.